In the later 20th to early 21st century, with the advent of increasing
globalism, it has become more difficult to
determine which individuals fit into which category, and the
East–West contrast is sometimes criticized as relativistic and arbitrary.

Globalism has, especially since the end of
the cold war, spread western ideas so
widely that almost all modern countries or cultures are to some
extent influenced by aspects of western culture which they have
absorbed. Recent stereotyped Western views of "the West" have been
labelled Occidentalism,
paralleling Orientalism, the term for
the 19th century stereotyped views of "the East".

History

Western culture is neither homogeneous nor unchanging. As with all
other cultures it has evolved and gradually changed over time. All
generalities about it have their exceptions at some time and place.
The organisation and tactics of the Greek Hoplites differed in many ways from the Roman legions. The polis
of the Greeks is not the same as the American superpower of the 21st century. The gladiatorial games of the Roman Empire are not identical to present-day
football. The art of Pompeii is not the art
of Hollywood. Nevertheless, it is possible to follow the
evolution and history of the West, and appreciate its similarities
and differences, its borrowings from, and contributions to, other
cultures of humanity.

The origins of the word "West" in terms of geopolitical boundaries
started in the 1800s and 1900s. Prior to this, most people would
have thoughts about different nations, languages, individuals, and
geographical regions, but with no idea of "Western" nations and
culture as some of us think today. Many world maps were so crude,
inaccurate, and not well known before the 1800s that specific
geographical and political differences would be harder to measure.
Few would have access to good maps and even fewer had access to
accurate descriptions of who lived in far away lands. Western
thought as we think of it recently, is shaped by ideas of the 1800s
and 1900s, originating mainly in Europe. What we think of as
Western thought today is generally defined as Greco-Roman and
Judeo-Christian culture, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and
colonialism. As a consequence the term "Western culture" is at
times unhelpful and vague, since the definition involved a vast
variety of distinct traditions, political groups, religious groups,
and individual writers over thousands of years.

Furthermore, "Western culture" has taken many of its elements from
neighboring areas in the Middle East and North Africa. Europe
(whose borders are arbitrary) is an area geographically connected
to Asia (forming Eurasia) and Africa, and important cultural
exchanges such as trade and migration take place.

Nevertheless the Greeks felt they were civilized and saw themselves
(in the formulation of Aristotle) as
something between the wild barbarians of
most of Europe and the soft, slavish Easterners. Inspired by
Eastern example, and yet felt to be different, ancient Greek
science, philosophy, democracy,
architecture, literature, and art
provided a foundation embraced and built upon by the Roman Empire as it swept up Europe, including
the Hellenic World in its conquests
in the 1st century BC. In the meantime however, Greece, under
Alexander, had become a capital of the East, and part of an
empire. The idea that the later Orthodox or Eastern Christian cultural descendants of
the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman empire, are a happy mean between
Eastern slavishness and Western barbarism is promoted to this day,
for example in Russia, creating a zone which is both Eastern and
Western depending upon the context of discussion.

For about five hundred years, the Roman Empire maintained the Greek
East and consolidated a Latin West, but an
East-West division remained, reflected in many cultural norms of
the two areas, including language. Although Rome, like Greece, was
no longer democratic, the idea of democracy remained a part of the
education of citizens, as if the emperors were a temporary
emergency measure.

Eventually the empire came to be increasingly officially split into
a Western and Eastern part, reviving old ideas of a contrast
between an advanced East, and a rugged West.

With the rise of Christianity in the midst of the Roman world, much
of Rome's tradition and culture were absorbed by the new religion,
and transformed into something new, which would serve as the basis
for the development of Western civilization after the fall of Rome.
Also, Roman culture mixed with the
pre-existing Celtic, Germanic and Slavic cultures, which slowly became
integrated into Western culture starting, mainly, with their
acceptance of Christianity.

The Medieval West

The Medieval West was at its broadest the same as Christendom, including both the "Latin" or
"Frankish" West, and the Orthodox Eastern part, where Greek
remained the language of empire. More narrowly, it was Catholic
(Latin) Europe. After the crowning of Charlemagne, this part of Europe was referred to
by its neighbors in Byzantium and the Moslem world as
"Frankish".

After the
fall of Rome much of Greco-Roman art,
literature, science and even technology were all but lost in the
western part of the old empire, centered around Italy, and
Gaul (France).
However, this would become the centre of a new West. Europe fell
into political anarchy, with many warring kingdoms and
principalities. Under the Frankish kings, it eventually reunified
and evolved into feudalism.

Much of the basis of the post-Roman cultural world had been set
before the fall of the Empire, mainly through the integrating and
reshaping of Roman ideas through Christian thought. The Greek and
Roman paganism had been
completely replaced by Christianity
around the 4th and 5th centuries, since it became the official
State religion following the baptism of emperor Constantine I. Roman
Catholic Christianity and the Nicene
Creed served as a unifying force in Western Europe, and in some respects replaced
or competed with the secular authorities. Art and literature, law,
education, and politics were preserved in the teachings of the
Church, in an environment that, otherwise, would have probably seen
their loss. The Church founded
many cathedrals, universities, monasteries and seminaries, some of which continue to exist today.
In the Medieval period, the route to power
for many men was in the Church.

In a broader sense, the Middle Ages,
with its tension between Greek reasoning
and Levantinemonotheism was not confined to the West but also
stretched into the old East, in what was to become the Islamic world. Indeed the debate between these two
streams of thought which is said to define the west was preserved
best there for a while, with Greek literature, and even some Eastern theology, making their way back to Western Europe
via Spain and Italy.

The rediscovery of the Justinian Code in
the early 10th century rekindled a passion for the discipline of
law, which crossed many of the re-forming boundaries between East
and West. Eventually, it was only in the Catholic or Frankish west,
that Roman law became the foundation on
which all legal concepts and systems were based. Its influence can
be traced to this day in all Western legal systems (although in
different manners and to different extents in the common (Anglo-American) and the civil (continental European) legal
traditions). The study of canon law, the
legal system of the Catholic Church, fused with that of Roman law
to form the basis of the refounding of Western legal scholarship.
The ideas of civil rights, equality before the law,
equality of women, procedural justice, and democracy as the ideal form of society, and were principles which formed the basis
of modern Western culture.

Religion in the meantime has waned considerably in Western Europe,
where many are agnostic or atheist. Nearly half of the populations of the
United
Kingdom (44-54%), Germany (41-49%),
France (43-54%) and the Netherlands (39-44%) are non-theist. However, religious
belief in the United States is very strong, about 75-85% of the
population, as also happens in most of Latin America.

As Europe discovered the wider world, old concepts adapted.
The
Islamic world which had formerly been considered "the Orient" ("the East") more specifically became the
"Near East" as the interests of the
European powers for the first time interferred with Qing China and Meiji Japan in the
19th century. Thus, the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895
occurred in the "Far East", while the
troubles surrounding the decline of the Ottoman Empire
simultaneously occurred in the "Near East". The "Middle East" in the mid-19th century included
the territory east of the Ottoman empire but West of China, i.e.
Greater Persia and Greater India, but is now used synonymously
with "Near East".

The Cold War West

Politics

Despite the Western empires in the past, concepts of democracy and
an emphasis on freedom has been seen as distinguishing Western
peoples from non-western neighbors.

In the Middle Ages and early modern times, the concept of a
separation of Church and
state developed, allowing for the development of more
distinctive political norms, such as the doctrine of the separation of powers, which make modern
Western democracy distinct from democracy in general.

In comparison to many other cultures in the world, western cultures
tend to emphasize the individual. Much
of this respect for difference and individual liberties remain,
however, still theoretical, in many ways, among mainstream society,
when the individual factor encounters a strong opposition from
social customs and consensus, and thus resists to be accepted or
understood. This situation, anyways, has tended to change among
most progressive sectors of society, as a consequence of the many
social and counter-cultural movements that the last decades have
come to see.

Creativity and the expression of the individual is commonly
encouraged in Western culture. New subcultures, art and technology
constantly emerge. Furthermore, capitalism which is found in almost
every western country, supports a highly individualistic
ideology.

The forms of government usually adopted in western societies, as a
part of a wider, nowadays ruling social-economical liberalcapitalist
structure, are multi-party parliamentary or presidential (also 'congressional') systems, frequently
referred to as figurativedemocracy, which favors some sort of majority
consensus when coming to adopt collective decisions.

Widespread Influence

Elements of Western culture have had a very influential role on
other cultures worldwide. People of many cultures, both Western and
non-Western, equate modernization (adoption of
technological progress) with westernization (adoption of
Western culture). Some members of the non-Western world have
suggested that the link between technological progress and certain
harmful Western values provides a reason why much of "modernity"
should be rejected as being incompatible with their vision and the
values of their societies. These types of argument referring to
imperialism and stressing the importance
of freedom from it and the
relativist argument that different
cultural norms should be treated equally, are also present in
Western philosophy. Also Marxism, sometimes
seen as an alternative to Western culture, comes from the
West.

What is generally uncontested, is that much of the technology and
social patterns which make up what is defined as "modernization"
were developed in the Western world.
Whether these technological and social patterns are intrinsically
part of Western culture, is more difficult to answer. Many would
argue that the question cannot be answered by a response from
positivisticscience and instead is a "value" question which must
be answered from a value system (e.g. philosophy, religion,
political doctrine). Nonetheless, much of anthropology today has
shown the close links between the physical environment and daily
activities and the formation of a culture (the findings of cultural ecology, among others).

Music, art, story-telling and architecture

Some cultural and artistic modalities are also characteristically
Western in origin and form. While dance, music, story-telling, and
architecture are human universals, they are expressed in the West
in certain characteristic ways.

While epic literary works in verse such as the Mahabarata and Homer's Iliad
are ancient and occurred worldwide, the novel
as a distinct form of story telling only arose in the West (with
the possible exception, though isolated, of the Japanese Tale of Genji, five greats epics of Tamil and
Persian Shahnama) in the period 1200 to 1750. Photography and the
motion picture as a technology and as the basis for entirely new
art forms were also developed first in the West. The soap opera, a popular culture dramatic form
originated in the United States first on radio in the 1930s, then a
couple of decades later on television. The music video was also developed in the West in
the middle of the twentieth century.

The arch, the dome, and the
flying buttress as architectural
motifs were first used by the Romans. Important western
architectural motifs include the Doric,
Corinthian, and Ionic columns, and the Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque,
and Victorian styles are
still widely recognised, and used even today, in the West. Much of
Western architecture emphasises repetition of simple motifs,
straight lines and expansive, undecorated planes. A modern
ubiquitous architectural form that emphasizes this characteristic
is the skyscraper, first developed in New
York and Chicago.

Oil painting is said to have originated
by Jan van Eyck, and perspective drawings and paintings
had their earliest practitioners in Florence. In art, the Celtic knot is a very distinctive Western
repeated motif. Depictions of the nude human
male and female in photography, painting and sculpture are
frequently considered to have special artistic merit. Realistic
portraiture is especially valued. In
Western dance, music, plays and other arts, the performers are only
very infrequently masked. There are essentially no taboos against
depicting God, or other religious figures, in a representational
fashion.

Scientific and Technological Inventions and Discoveries

A feature of Western culture is its focus on science and
technology, and its ability to generate new processes, materials
and material artifacts.

It was the West that first developed steam power and adapted its
use into factories, and for the generation of electrical power.
[citation needed] The Otto and the
Diesel internal combustion engines are
products whose genesis and early development were in the West.
Nuclear power stations are derived
from the first atomic pile in Chicago
(1942). The electrical dynamo,
transformer, and electric light, and
indeed most of the familiar electrical appliances, were inventions
of the West.

A tradition and idea of importance of law
which has its roots in both Roman law and
the Bible.

Widespread usage of terms and specific vocabulary borrowed,
based or derived from Greek and
Latin roots or etymologies for
almost any field of arts, science and human knowledge, becoming
easily understandable and common to almost any European language,
and being a source for inventing internationalized neologisms for nearly any purpose. It is not rare
for full loan Latin phrases or expressions, such as in
situ, grosso modo or tempus fugit, to be in
usage, many of them giving name to artistic or literatic concepts
or currents. The usage of such roots and phrases is standardized in
giving official scientific names for biological species (such as Homo
sapiens or Tyrannosaurus
rex). This shows a reverence for these languages, called
classicism.

Different currents of utopian and scientific socialist ideas,
that has developed and evolved into all a world tradition of
activism and critic theories against current model of unjust,
class-divided, unequalitary societies. Being an expression of it
revolutionary ideologies of high repercussion in modern times such as Republicanism, Utopian Socialism, Unionism, Anarchism,
Marxism, Guevarism
and New Left, among others.

Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science
and Technology: The Lives & Achievements of 1510 Great
Scientists from Ancient Times to the Present Revised second
edition, Doubleday (1982) ISBN 0-385-17771-2.

Walsh, James Joseph, The
Popes and Science; the History of the Papal Relations to Science
During the Middle Ages and Down to Our Own Time, Fordam
University Press, 1908, reprinted 2003, Kessinger Publishing. ISBN
0-7661-3646-9 Reviews: P.462[754647]

Further reading

Stearns, P.N. (2003). Western Civilization in World
History. New York: Routledge.